Keats Symposium: James Najarian Discusses Thomas Hood Embracing the Shadow of John Keats

James Najarian delivered a paper for the Roundtable on Keats’s Afterlives at the Keats Symposium, “The Emergence of Keats as a Poet,” hosted by Fordham University on October 7, 2017. His essay examined variations on Keats's poetry by Thomas Hood. We asked Najarian to elaborate on the poets' relationship, sequels in poetry, and the often derided term "minor poet."

Your paper addressed Thomas Hood’s variations on Keats’s poems. Can you expand on this relationship? Why Hood, and why Keats?

Hood is one of those very hard-to-classify poets, both Victorian and Romantic (he died in 1845), that scholars are aware of but seldom familiar with, outside of a few rather unrepresentative pieces one finds occasionally in anthologies. In Hood’s case, that includes “The Bridge of Sighs” and “The Song of the Shirt,” both of which Hood composed late in his  career and contemporaneous with the Victorian “factory” or “social problem” novel, with which they converse. Hood might be thought of as a “2.5” generation Romantic: his memoir places Lamb at the center of his group of other writers. Their time was the 1820s.  I am afraid Hood chose Keats long before I did. Hood had early access to Keats’s work through John Hamilton Reynolds, another collaborator and writer for the London Magazine, who was Keats’s friends and Hood’s brother-in-law. At the very least, Hood’s “serious” work of the 1820s reflects his admiration for Keats, though I argue there is more going on there.

You mentioned that Hood's work becomes a "sequel" to Keats’s work. This use of “sequel” seems different from typical ideas associated with the term. How does a study of Hood’s adaptations of Keats alter our understanding of sequels?

We usually don’t think of poems as having sequels. I am trying to look at what has long been dismissed as Hood’s “imitative” work and classify or examine what in this particular case “imitation” means. Hood does not simply borrow tropes or narrative moments from Keats, but rather prolongs Keats’s work by a combination of re-statement, replication, and suspension. If you’d like more of “To Autumn,” you might turn to Hood’s “Ode: Autumn.” In a way, you will get more of the same. 

We understand that your current book project addresses the role of “minor poets” in the Romantic period. How does your essay on Hood help us to think differently about these poets?

In my book project, I historicize our commonplace use of the term “minor poet,” which I think critics throw around without thinking about it. I am not arguing that poets “become” minor, but that certain poets turn from the long serious poem after it goes out of style around 1820 to exploit new modes of publication by specializing in a particular brand of lyric that becomes each poet’s own; they choose to be, or seem to choose to be, minor. Think of Felicia Hemans: she abandons the long feminine-heroic poem to become a successful poet of constraint, of hearth and home. Or Hood: after his “serious” volume goes belly-up he successfully re-casts himself as “merely” a comic periodical poet. Many “minor poets” after Hemans and Hood follow their lead. “Minor” is actually a mode of poetic success -- even of branding; “Romantic Failure” is another, different volume. I argue that these minor poets accepted and then deployed their imposed limitations. I might also include here Charles Lamb, Winthrop Mackworth Praed, and the later career of Leigh Hunt, though we might also think of Walter Savage Landor or “Barry Cornwall” in this space, too.